The UPA government could be breathing easy with experts predicting that foodgrain prices will cool down by the year-end when several key states go to the polls, but the impact of a neglected agriculture sector are bound to haunt the country for long. India could become a chronic net importer of rice and wheat by 2020 if the trends are not reversed.

Pointing this out, a yet-to-be-released report of ASSOCHAM has warned that India will have to increase its rice yield growth rates by 250% to ensure self-sufficiency. Simultaneously, by current trends, the country could fall short of 23 million tonnes of wheat by 2020 that it would need to meet through imports. The latter figures emerge out of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute's work.

A good monsoon this year might help the government lower the prices by year end and gain some political relief with the ruling coalition touting better overall production and therefore procurement of grains. But a more objective picture is based on per capita availability of foodgrain, not gross totals.

The per capita annual availability in India has retarded from 174.23 kg per person per year averaged over the '90s to 163.33 kg per person per year averaged over 2000-06. In an era where economic growth has, post-liberalisation, shown a quantum jump, the food availability has fallen to the level of the '60s when India had recorded serious famines.

While a rising population has obviously been a major cause of such decline, the stagnation in yields and a halt in increase of acreage under rice particularly is as much to blame. The report points out that the yield of milled rice in the country increased from 863 kg per hectare in 1966-67 to 2,079 kg per hectare in 2001-02, growing at the compounded annual growth rate of 2.54%. But since then, the growth rate has come down to a mere 0.45%.

In wheat too, the yields secured in 2001-02 of 2,778 kg per hecatare have not been achieved since. It is provisionally estimated at 2,742 kg per hectare for 2007-08. The total production too in case of wheat remains at the levels achieve in 2001-02.

The demand for wheat, the report also points out, is bound to increase in years to come not only because of increasing population but change in consumption patterns. The demand for 'whole wheat' ingredients in food products is rising and wheat is becoming a more acceptable key source of fibrous diet.

The shrinking public investment in the agricultural sector and dipping growth in irrigation have been the basic ingredients of this policy failure that could again fade from public memory if prices stabilize over next six months.